Another Pile of Dust
by TheArchimage
Summary: The Throne of Want gives whoever sits on it what they desire.


I wrote this quite a few years ago after I beat Dark Souls 2 for the first time and kind of forgot about it before I posted it. I found it while rummaging around my hard drive, so I cleaned it up and here it is. Leave a kudos and a comment if you like it!

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The throne is made of stone and brutally crude in design and form. A thin layer of soot covers each and every surface, smoothing out the bumps and ridges. It is shaped and sized for something larger than a human but smaller than a giant. Many have sat on this throne, but no trace of them remains. It does not remember any of the previous rulers. It is just for me. It beckons to me, whispers sweet nothings in my ear that I am its only true owner, that those who sat on this throne before me were only pretenders. It offers all its powers to me, and pledges to make the world exactly as I wish it to be.

I am not fooled but I sit down anyway. As I do the doors of the kiln slide shut. The Emerald Herald, whoever and whatever she is, bids me a final farewell. There is no comfort in her words. She claims I have a choice, but she knows as well as I do there is no meaning in my choice. Some who have sat on the Throne of Want chose to rule and rekindled the fire of the world with their own life and soul and desires. The world is rejuvenated, but the fires wane eventually. Others chose to let the fire go out entirely. For a time the darkness rules, but the fire is rekindled someday. Two paths which diverge, only to curve toward each other again. No matter what my desire, in a hundred or two hundred or a thousand years there will be another Undead in this room, sitting in this chair, endlessly thinking about a decision which does not and cannot carry any meaning. Still, I must make a choice.

No sunlight sneaks into the kiln, here in the depths of the earth. Even the light and warmth of the bonfires, my only and most trusted companions during my long journey here, cannot penetrate the gloom. The air thrums with anticipation. Remake the world, or let it crumble. The Throne will not judge, it only serves. The throne, too, knows the futility of providing the choice at all, but unlike me it still has some enthusiasm for the outcome.

Now I see, too late to save myself, what it means to be a ruler. It means awareness. It means deception. It means being searingly, horrifyingly cognizant that there is no hope, no escape, and having to pretend there is a grand plan so the people you rule over never suspect how precarious their existence really is.

In my mind's eye I see a pale being, seeking forbidden knowledge and committing atrocities in an attempt to fill the void in his heart. Many years later his part is re-enacted by a humble lord. I am reminded of a witch who had only the best of intentions, her world falling apart because she did not understand what she wrestled with. Did that lost prisoner truly understand what she was doing or what the consequences would be if her gambit had succeeded? In his hubris a king allowed a demon into his heart in the belief it could be controlled. A faint echo of a long-forgotten ruler was nestled in his heart, and certainly pride was his sin as well. As for that shambling thing at the bottom of the well? In the time of Drangleic as before, it was content to sit back and let catastrophe unfold, never lifting a finger to stop the approaching calamity until its mind and body had both wasted away.

The same sins. The same mistakes. The message is clear: the world will not change because humanity will not change. Something like ice creeps through my veins. I begin to see lights in the darkness, my eyes growing so tired of the black it invents images for me to see. I wonder if this is what it means to go mad. No, I realize, I have been mad before. I preferred it to this.

I find myself thinking of the previous kings and rulers. This place has held too many names over the millennia, now too many to keep track of. Straid had called his homeland Olaphis. He was literally the only person left alive who even knew the name of that place. But at one time it surely spanned the globe. With the power of the Throne behind it, how could it fail? Olaphis surely had its own history, its own culture, its own gods and goddesses and works of art and conquests and failures and it was gone it was nothing all worth nothing in the end because the fire burned it burned everything all away until there was nothing left but ash and I am trying to sift through the soot with cracked and dried and gray fingers trying to find some scrap of hope some assurance that maybe humanity could learn maybe someday there would be something more than this endlessly bleak existence of rising and falling and forgetting and what I would give to have another pile of ash to dig through just one more so I could hold onto that fleeting hope that drove me here and kept me going but its gone all-

"You have seen it, perhaps, in a dream."

I blink tears from my eyes. What was I just thinking about? Ash, ashen, something… like wisps of smoke I see it, I reach for it, it slips through my fingers, and it is gone. A moment ago those thoughts were the whole of my existence, but a wind has blown through my mind to erase any trace of it. There is not even a monument to its passing; the lone and level sands stretch far away. This is happening more and more frequently. My mind is unwell these days. The curse of the Darksign wears heavily. I wake like this without any memory of how I got where I am or what I was planning to do. Brief flashes of faces sometimes appear to me, in my more lucid moments. Memories of a time and place and past that used to be.

I am standing in front of an old woman. She is seated at a spinning wheel, lazily measuring lengths of thread while she speaks to me. "There is a kingdom," she says, words dripping with portent. "Far to the north. I believe they call it Drangleic." Drangleic? That sounds familiar. There is some way to lift the Darksign there, I distinctly remember hearing that before. That must be what I am here for, information on Drangleic. One skill a Hollow learns early is how to pretend. To accept. To nod as though nothing is wrong, and pick up whatever scraps of meaning and purpose you can from wherever you find yourself. As long as you cover your face and act normally, no one else suspects a thing. They do not see the thing they are sharing a room with is a half-mad corpse because they choose not to see. As long as I act as though I belong I can muddle through somehow.

The old woman raises an eyebrow at me. "Perhaps you are familiar with it? No, how could that be…?" She smiles through missing and crooked teeth. Her milky eyes wracked with cataracts see something I with my perfect vision do not. "But one day you will stand before its decrepit gate without really knowing why. Like a moth drawn to a flame, your wings will burn in anguish. Time and time again. For that is your fate, the fate of the cursed."

No, I tell myself. Perhaps it is destiny, but not forever, not eternally. There is a way out, there is a way to stop the curse and save the world. I believe that. I have to believe that. I stand up, satisfied I have learned all I can. I leave repeating the name to myself over and over again, "Drangleic, Drangleic, Drangleic," trying to engrave it into my mind. The sense of familiarity has not faded, and for a moment I am terrified that perhaps I learned of Drangleic somewhere else and forgot about it, and are only now picking up the discarded thread to lead me out of the labyrinth. How long ago was it? How many times? It does not matter. The only thing I can do is move forward, always ever forward, toward the light of salvation. It exists there, in Drangleic. It must. It has to.


End file.
